13. The HQV Benchmark

HQV stands for Hollywood Quality Video. The HQV DVD video benchmark includes a regular DVD with different scenes that present potential visual problems to a DVD decoder. Points are awarded if the decoder handles the problems so that viewers don't see them; points are not awarded if it doesn't do the job. In looking over our benchmark results, we immediately observed that the Intel and AMD processors scored the same, irrespective of their model numbers (and in fact, the results from both processors are pretty similar).

Rather than stepping you through the entire sequence of tests and explaining them in detail, we refer you to Don Woligroski's January 9, 2007, article for Tom's Hardware entitled Avivo vs. Purevideo, Round 1 wherein he walks readers through the whole shebang. Here, we provide a brief table instead that summarizes results for each vendor's CPUs with a one-liner explanation and remarks for each one. We need only observe here that each test (or sub-test, when a particular test involves multiple versions or iterations) produces a score (maximum scores vary), where the score indicates the degree to which the decoder can handle things perfectly.

Overall, the CPU seems to make very little difference in the output of high quality video when everything except CPU and motherboard stay the same between builds. We have to guess this reflects the common graphics card more than differences among CPUs.